1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a system for mobile e-business on client devices such as, personal digital assistants (PDAs), Pocket PCs, etc., integrated with private exchanges and sell-side servers and more specifically to an e-business framework on mobile clients, where the control mechanism handles migration of business processes based on events such as a user and migration conditions and search for appropriate clients and servers that are available for migrating the business processes.
2. Description of Related Art
With advances in computing and communication capabilities of hand-held devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), Pocket PCs, wireless enabled laptop computers, cell phones and other such computing devices, an emergence of a variety of applications in mobile e-business (m-business) is being seen. These mobile devices are becoming as powerful as desktop personal computers (PCs), thereby attracting consumers and businesses to use them in daily business and recreational activities. The mobile e-business is considered to be a major business opportunity area in the coming years. Currently various groups and companies are experimenting with mobile applications in order to validate the possibility of using these devices for all kinds of core business activities.
Given the falling costs, increasing computational power and ease of use of, the market for mobile phones and hand-held devices is exploding. According to Durlacher Research Ltd. “Mobile Commerce Report”, February, 2000, the current estimate of a number of devices sold is around 500 million and growing to a billion in the next couple of years. In contrast, according to that report and J. Sairamesh et al., “A Platform for Sell-side private exchanges”, IBM Systems Journal, May 2002 (Sairamesh 1), the number of desktop PCs has saturated to around 500 million. Most mobile users will at some point in the future have more than one mobile device and will increasingly depend on these devices for accessing the Internet and performing daily activities. For businesses, still according to the “Mobile Commerce Report”, Sairamesh 1, and P. Timmers, “Electronic Commerce: Strategies and Models for B2B Trading,” Wiley, 1999, low costs and increased capacity provides a tremendous opportunity to exploit these mobile devices for routine business to business (B2B) activities, such as purchasing, point of sale, inventory tracking, order status and order notifications, warehouse management, and others.
What drives this explosion, are factors including reduction in cost, improved computing capabilities, transparency, and reliability. Economics is playing a role in bringing low cost computing to the consumer, whether a business or an individual, who can easily access the Internet through a mobile device. Internet enabled mobile devices are gaining popularity as the costs of subscription to wireless Internet services are getting lower, as shown by the “Mobile Commerce Report”, J. Sairamesh et al., “Wireless B2B Trading”, proceedings of the First ACM Workshop on Mobile Commerce, (conjunction with Mobicom, 2001) (Sairamesh 2), and Margaret H. Dunham et al., “A Mobile Transaction Model That Captures Both the Data and Movement Behavior,” MONET 2(2): 149-162 (1997).
The increasing computing power and storage in the hand-held devices, makes such devices almost as powerful as desktop PC of some years back. Most of the hand-held devices, such as Palm Pilot and PocketPC devices, offer memory in a range of 16 to 256 Mega bytes, which is large enough to handle common operating systems, small footprint databases, web-browsers, and other applications. Some of the devices support 200 to 400 MHz of processing capacity, which is very powerful by today's standards and able to run complex applications.
Mobile business users usually own one or more wired and wireless devices, e.g., PCs, laptops, and increasingly using these devices for business activities either at home or office. In essence, users would prefer to have seamless access to business information and business critical processes through every device. This is becoming increasingly important for business employees, who are mobile and own multiple handheld devices, to access their intranets. With multiple devices owned and used by business users, information and processes can be migrated from device to device for better reliability. A further factor has been in providing reliability of critical business information, and processes.
Some real business scenarios for mobile e-business applications in retail and wholesale distribution based on common customer requirements for their sales and purchasing departments are presented below with reference to FIG. 1. As an example, consider a purchasing manager 20 of a car dealership checking an inventory of tires (not shown) in his dealership. The manager finds that the inventory of tires from the manufacturer X is low, and wishes to place an order to a distributor 22 of those tires. Assuming that the manager 20 or his dealership are registered at the distributor's website 24. The manager logs-in or connects through an office computer 26 at the dealership to the distributor's website 24 supported on one or more computing devices or servers 30. The server 30 may include various databases 32 of catalogs and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) subsystem 34 for providing stock and order shipping details gathered from factories, storehouses, and trucks 34. Server 30 may be further connected to an order notification system 36 operated automatically or by an internal sales agent of the distributor for the purpose of verifying received customer orders and providing order response and approval.
The manager 20 searches for and, when found, retrieves from the server 30 and its databases 32 a part of the distributor's catalog on tires, such catalog may include, for example price and availability information. Accordingly, a copy of the retrieved distributor catalog is now stored on the manager's office computing device 26. The purchasing manager 20 browses the catalog locally, i.e., on the computing device 26, and adds items to a shopping cart on the database of that device 26. By the end of the day, the purchasing manager 20 may create a few “pending” shopping lists, and place the rest for order.
After work the purchasing manager 20 travels home, where (s)he wishes to continue working on the order placement of the pending shopping lists. What is required for this is for the work computing device 26 to automatically contact the home computing device 28 and for the business processes and business context, i.e., the downloaded catalogs and the shopping list, to migrate from the work computer 26 to the home computer 28. The purchasing manager 20 can then continue performing unfinished business processes in a seamless, transparent manner on the second computing device.
The scenario described above may be spoiled or prevented by failures that can occur during any stage of the migration process. In the above scenario it was assumed that when the migration of the business processes and context was taking place between the manager's two computing devices 26-28, one at work and the other at home, the devices were in connected mode. If the devices are connected to the network 18, the migration takes place smoothly. If during the migration, there is a disconnect from the network 18, then the computing device at work monitors the disconnection and waits for connectivity to be established for migration to continue.
The disconnect can occur during any stage of the purchasing process due to many reasons including network time-out or network failure, low battery, local memory constraints and other system failures. For example, the mobile device may be disconnected from the network when retrieving catalog entries from the server 30 or when trying to send a completed order to the distributor server 30. In addition the communication network could be slow enough to cause a time-out at the client side, causing disconnection.
What is needed is a method to seamlessly migrate one or more business processes, objects, and their work environment between a plurality of computing devices belonging to a user and a server.